A Gathering of Garter Snakes - Hardcover

Grade 4-6-Lavies's latest photo essay focuses on red-sided garter snakes in Manitoba, Canada. The book chronicles the animals' activities from spring to fall, following them as they slowly awaken from their mass hibernation, mate, migrate to the marshlands, and return to their rocky caverns. The text also describes the reptiles' physical characteristics, behavior, diet, method of locomotion, birth of young, and encounters with humans. Quotes from people whose homes are in the creatures' migratory path reveal situations both amusing and horrifying. The full-color photos, many of which are full-page, are sharply focused and imaginatively composed. Particularly memorable are the shots of a small snake rising from a pile of entwined reptiles, framed by human fingers; a baby garter snake emerging from its bloody membrane sac; a middle-aged, smiling woman chopping vegetables on a counter while a snake slithers over the carrots. A number of titles mention the garter snake, such as Lilo Hess's That Snake in the Grass (Scribners, 1987), or Sylvia A. Johnson's Snakes (Lerner, 1986), but not in detail. While images of massed, writhing reptiles may not appeal to the squeamish, budding herpetologists will pore over Lavies's title with glee.
Karey Wehner, San Francisco Public Library
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 3-6, younger for reading aloud. Lavies brings new vitality to a perennially popular subject with superb action color photographs and a clear, fact-filled text that is dramatic without being in any way sensationalist. Focusing on a particular species--the 18-inch, red-sided garter snake--in a particular place in Manitoba, Canada, Lavies begins with the communal dens where more than 10,000 snakes are waking from hibernation. Then she describes how the snakes mate, migrate, hunt their prey and eat it, give birth, shed their skins, and return to hibernation. The photographs show the "rippling knots of snakes" and also one snake at a time, close-up and from various angles. One remarkable picture is from the perspective of a snake on a road, looking at an oncoming car. There are close-ups of a frog filling a snake's mouth, of the moment of birth, of the process of shedding. A shivery personal final page shows Lavies lying with her camera in a pit of snakes: "I used to be terrified," she says, but she had to learn to accept them when she found them under her camera, inside her hat, and neatly curled up on the backseat of her car. Hazel Rochman